You don't mention the operating system (and C run-time libraries) used with these different machines. It appears to me that you've got a C run-time library that has an "extended" atof() (or whatever you built Perl to use to convert strings to numbers) that, for strings that start with "0x", converts the hex value into the mantissa of the resulting floating point number. I wonder what you have to add to the string to specify the exponent.

Please give us the details on OS and C RTL versions and the config options related to number conversion that were used to build Perl. I also think a bug report to p5p is in order. Run perlbug to generate one of these.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")